Tying Down The Lion (28 page)

I know what she means. Last year, I saw Otis Redding singing “Shake” on
Ready, Steady, Go!
There were gyrating dancers, flailing limbs and at least one bare midriff. Tch-tch. How would that go down here? Dad said, “Blood and sand, I’ll have to cover my eyes,” proceeding to glue himself to the screen, and Grandma said, “Ooh, haven’t the black and white minstrels got a lot to answer for?”

“Our dance is…how you say it…demure. Suitable for young and old,” Ilse says, winking at me again. “You see, we need protection from evil. We are children always. Not to be corrupted.”

Everything seems less sinister the longer I sit in the brown chair and stir the melamine cup of brown sediment that passes for coffee. This is a proper home and for the first time since we arrived, I am not damp with nerves. If I had the latest
Mandy
on my lap and could forget the world outside, it would all be fine.
Petticoat
feels like a step too far now. Tuesday has stepped onto a catwalk that runs for more than a million miles, and she’s just not ready.

Soldiers are pacing the streets below. Fractured families pray, or plot an escape that could end in a hail of bullets. The Wall is closing us in. But I feel so safe with Ilse that the fact that I have only ever danced with a partner once before—a terrifying gallop around the junior gym with Gary Bust, whose Way-Finder shoes kicked my shins so hard his secret compass flew out of the heel—I don’t even feel anxious about learning the Lipsi.

Life must have followed this homely pattern after the war was declared. From what Grandma tells me about those times, one minute it was pass the ginger-nuts and let’s all have a sing-song by the fire with
Peg’s Paper
, and the next minute was…exactly the same. Just less sugar in the tea, less coal for the fire. Shortages meant solidarity. Home mattered more than ever. With less to have, they stretched what was there. Nothing smug or stiff-upper-lipped about it; it was just how things were. Ilse’s life has taken a chilling twist, but that same spirit is here in this flat.

She passes me a slice of the cold-dog cake she made for us this morning. It’s one of those cocoa, crushed biscuit and melted margarine mixtures that set hard in the fridge. It reminds me of the unique taste of school cookery-lesson food when it isn’t cheese-pie or semolina. We’re meant to take it home, but can never resist it in the bus queue, except when Gillian and I made the Christmas pudding that put us in mind of Pedigree Chum. Ilse’s cake isn’t exactly chocolaty, but it is
lecker
, which means ‘bloody luscious’. Especially if your mum’s cakes have the consistency of a cliff face, the chalk kind. I lick my fingers while Ilse and Mum light up cigarettes.

“I can’t believe they let women drive trams,” Mum says, looking for an ash-tray.

“Why not, Birgit?” Ilse says. She passes Mum a small ash-tray piled high with dog-ends.

“But when we were young,” Mum says, “we were taught that the heart of a German woman’s life should be the three Ks:
Kinder
,
Kirche
,
Küche
.”

Children, church and kitchen, apparently, a principle dating back to Kaiser blooming Bill. “For Beate,” Mum goes on, “that is still her belief.”

For Beate, there should be a fourth K, for
Kirschwasser
.

“Yes, my dear Birgit,” Ilse agrees. “But since the war, it has become a ridiculous saying. Beate and I became rubble-women. We helped to rebuild the ruined city. We cared for the wounded, buried the dead and rescued anything and anyone we could. We had no children, no kitchen. And as far as I was concerned, since it was roofless, if the rain was pouring we also had no church. But as Germany recovered, the West returned to the old ways. Women were back in the home again, cooking and having babies. In the East, we became workers as well as housewives. Women can do it all here you know.”

Mum, who concentrates with varying degrees of success on two of the three Ks, the church not being a feature of our life in England, struggles to take this in.

“And the state help you with this?” she asks.

“Birgit, we are encouraged so much, you would not believe.”

“It sounds fabulous,” I tell her.

“Fabulous? Ah, perhaps it is, Jacqueline.”

“Well, you must have more choice of things to do. It’s exciting. I mean, women here don’t have to polish their sideboards all day.”

Ilse winks at Mum. “But Jacqueline,” she says, “choice is the one thing we do not have. So many men have died in the war or escaped this country that women
must
drive trams and dig ditches! The country would not function without us. We are expected, not asked, to do it.”

I swallow the dusty dregs of the disgusting chicory-coffee, which tastes of old leaves, to show her I don’t mind it at all. She watches me and her laugh bubbles up.

“So polite,” she says, shaking her head in wonder and seizing Mum’s hand. “I hear the English have beautiful manners and now I know it’s true.”

She shows me two presents she has bought for Victor. One is a comic about a yellow teddy-bear called Bummi, which he’ll love just for the name. The other is a kit similar to Lego bricks for building a modern East German block of flats, pre-made in white plastic panels with red window sills and quickly assembled to the height of twenty storeys. He will love it. T-K can lie on the flat roof to snipe at people or whatever he does when he’s on top of a building. It reminds me of the pre-fabs in Oaking, except they have only one level and are meant to be temporary homes.

Every pre-fab has properly fitted cupboards and a gas fridge that tucks into the corner. Our cupboards at home have gaps between them where the steam and grease stick disgusting balls of dirty fluff to the sides. Elsie’s pre-fab can be cleaned throughout in fifty minutes flat and is so compact she can keep an eye on Big Stan at all times. When Grandma used to stay there, before Elsie put a stop to that, she slept in the tiny second bedroom, which was home to Elsie’s parrot, Neville, and all Stan’s spare knife-sets and old boxing-gloves. But his great boxing and butchering hands also tenderly glued a bedside shelf onto the headboard for Grandma and placed Elsie’s spare pink-frilled lamp and a chipped porcelain lady in crinolines on it. Grandma said, “Sheer blooming luxury to have your own special shelf right beside you, even when you sit up and bash your bonce on it.”

“I have friends who live in these brand-new boxes that are made in factories,” Ilse says, pointing at the toy pre-fab. “But I am glad we found this beautiful old house. Beate and I moved in here with many other homeless people and refugees after the Allies came. The owners had fled the country long ago before the Nazis could catch up with them. It somehow survived the air-raids, although the roof is still so badly damaged we must catch the drips. Beate used to love taking charge of the buckets! The rooms were still grand before they were turned into apartments.”

“It is like my old home,” Mum says, lighting another cigarette. “Imagine the parties here, the chandeliers and a grand piano, a ballroom that took up more space than two or three of these flats.”

“Yes, there was still a piano here when we arrived. Sadly, the Soviet soldiers had not treated it well. As for the ballroom, even if the owners had still lived here, the state authorities would have cut the house up into these flats. The pretty carvings along the walls are still here, at least parts of them, but the war has wiped away most of its history. And the need to make lots of these sensible workers’ deposit boxes has removed nearly all the rest.” She gives me her usual smile and wink, stubbing out her cigarette with a hint of controlled fury.

***

We visit Ilse’s friends, trailing up and down the beautiful staircases because the lifts haven’t worked for a while. In the other little brown flats, all with identical furniture, we meet Silke, Uwe, Barbara, Karin and Dieter, all close comrades, they tell us, their work binding them together. They are machinists in a textile factory and make jokes about their hearing being poor from the racket in what sounds like a vast windowless shed stuffed with needle-pounding contraptions.

Barbara has calloused fingers from the unforgiving work. Silke, older and with an even more delicate frame, has misshapen hands and a useless right ear.

“Our factory has clubs after work. We must attend them for the friendship it provides,” Uwe tells us.

“You can’t have much time at home,” Mum says. “Especially the women with children to collect and meals to cook.”

“Women are allowed time off to have babies,” Barbara says. “They can raise young children without being afraid their jobs will not wait for them. It is so easy to return to work because we have the State kindergartens. It is very modern here. Oh yes.”

She doesn’t have Ilse’s mocking tone and looks shocked when I tell her hardly any mums work in Oaking. Gaye Kennedy’s aunt is a go-go dancer by night. Every New Year’s Eve, when she insists on singing “Hey Big Spender” in their front-room, they have to hide the budgie in the attic. The central nervous system of a bird is not designed for that sort of shock.

“In East Germany,” Ilse explains, “women have the same rights as men. The difference is that mothers are allowed one day at home with their children every month. And they are also paid for having babies.
Mein Gott
, what stops us having a whole army of them, you may ask? Easy money, no?”

“So, the more you give birth, the more you are paid?” Mum says, her mouth gaping.

“It’s like collecting milk bottle tops for guide dogs,” I point out to her. “Fifty’s probably enough for a paw, but you have to drink gallons to get half a puppy.”

Giving Ilse a glance to reprimand her scornful tone and me a dark look, Barbara says, “It costs us very little money to bring up a family.”

“That is because there is nothing to buy,” Ilse chips in.

“Rent never rises,” Uwe says, ignoring Ilse to support Barbara’s party line. “Prices are low.”

Uwe and Barbara seem grateful for their plain homes and grisly clothes and harsh jobs, for their daily guarantee that this is all there is and everyone has the same, ruling out jealousy or poisonous grudges.

“East Germany is all about hard-working families,” Uwe tells us in his smooth English, his words marbled with pride.

“Oh sure, they want us girls in the kitchen as well as in the bedroom as well as on the machines having our ear-drums blown to pieces,” Karin says, rolling a tight cigarette on her lap.

“What else?” Uwe booms, imposing and beefy in his square donkey jacket and work-boots, despite the sweltering day.

He speaks as if work is their right and their duty, for men and women, mothers too. It’s so hard for me to understand. I know nothing other than fathers setting off to work while mothers make up the fire and stir the porridge. And in the afternoons, fathers come home to warm their hands and sit their children on their lap while mothers stir the stew. That’s how I imagine it will be for me and Peter.

“And one day when I’m married,” Karin says, hands on her hips, “my children will stare at the posters on the kindergarten walls all day long and learn their messages by heart. ‘For Peace and Socialism, Are You Prepared?’ When I carry them home after ten hours at the factory, stopping to queue for meat and butter on the way, I will listen to them sleepily singing ‘When I Grow Up I’ll Join the People’s Army’.”

I’m fascinated by her green nylon trousers. They are the most awful shape, the fabric washed so many times it’s bitty and thin. She sounds angry and plucky, her spirit more alive than her fashion-sense. As she licks her cigarette-paper, her small eyes dart like tadpoles in my direction, as if I come from Mars. Tuesday would have given her such a glare, but I smile because however bad my clothes are, compared with those nylon monstrosities they look like something from Biba.

***

In her own flat again, Ilse shows Mum and me her copy of
Sybille
magazine, smoothing its thin cover before she opens it.

“The clothes in this country are so, so bad,” she says with one of her winks, her eyes rolling upwards to Karin’s flat, where the green trouser-legs flap and the plastic flatties pace. “But
Sybille
is a way to fight back.”

She glances up again before opening the magazine, spreading out the dress patterns printed on cheap paper inside it.

The pictures show beautiful girls in truly elegant dresses, but they are only connected by a thread to the latest fashions. One page reveals girls posing in a tumble-down street, their romantic ballerina dresses billowing in the wind, their expressions fierce. They look as if they have danced their way out of the rubble to light up the grim background.

“These styles are all created by unknown designers,” Ilse says, turning another page. “None of the dresses are for sale. Our stores never stock fashion. We have one size for all on the racks. We must make do with any material we can find to sew the
Sybille
patterns.”

Mum and I watch the pages turn.
Sybille
is hollering a message to all East German women, telling them they could look a little less prudish and dull. For once, there is no State propaganda. Women are beckoned beyond their dismal world and shown how to make something of their own.

“The patterns are our promise of escape, even if the escape is only in our imaginations,” Ilse says. “Uwe knows a model who works for
Sybille
and she says the Central Committee is watching the magazine. All the staff and models are under surveillance. The articles in here often have to be changed. If they don’t conform to the way the State wants us to think, some are refused permission and cannot be published at all. The model’s last cover picture was forbidden because she was posing behind a barrier.”

“What?”

“The State wishes us all to look free, Jacqueline. East German women do not stand behind walls. They stand in front of them.”

I imagine an Englishman in a bowler hat scrutinising
Woman’s Realm
and shaking his head at the cable-knit cardigans.

“The models are not professionals,” she explains. “They would not appear in your…what do you have in England?”